Glare-free forward illumination has become an important goal to improve night driving safety for vehicles. Automotive headlamps with patterned beams have been proposed to dynamically illuminate the field of view. In some applications, the headlamp beam pattern may be modified based on data from a variety of sources, including forward looking sensors, indicators or beacons located on the roadway, with positional or traffic data from GPS receivers, or even attitude sensors. Headlamp systems using dynamic beam adaptation potentially enable a number of applications, such as: glare-free high beams; pedestrian face masking; animal spot lighting; target painting; reflection reduction; vehicle attitude compensation; adaptive front beam steering; and projecting information on the roadway.
U.S. Pat. No. 9,068,711 discloses glare free lighting with a low resolution pixel count, both vertically and horizontally. Although this low resolution approach can provide glare free masking, the coarse resolution may cause distraction to the driver. U.S. Pat. No. 7,188,984 discloses matrix type headlamps made with an array of LED sources, but the maximum pixel resolution shown in this arrangement is 25×30 (which amounts to 750 pixels), so this arrangement likewise has a relatively low resolution. With these low resolution approaches, a blanked area in the adaptive beam might appear to move jerkily or in jumps when viewed by the driver.